Rapper Riff Raff gives a strong endorsement to the new issue of the literary magazine The New York Tyrant.

Ian McEwan remembers his friend, the late Christopher Hitchens: “Where others might have beguiled themselves with thoughts of divine purpose (why me?) and dreams of an afterlife, Christopher had all of literature. Over the three days of my final visit I took a note of his subjects. Not long after he stole my Ackroyd, he was talking to me of a Slovakian novelist; whether Dreiser in his novels about finance was a guide to the current crisis; Chesterton's Catholicism; Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, which I had brought for him on a previous visit; Mann's The Magic Mountain – he'd reread it for reflections on German imperial ambitions towards Turkey.”

The European Commission and the Department of Justice are launching a joint investigation into e-book pricing.

Czech dissident, writer, and former president Vaclav Havel has died at 75. The New Yorker has put together a top ten list of Havel’s greatest writing hits, including his contemporaries and writers he admired.